I'll state, out-front, that COVID-19 is real. I'm not debating that. It can be seen under a microscope. It's real. What seems less than real, however, is the hysteria associated with it. For example - my co-worker called this morning and said he was taking the rest of the week off because someone who was at his house last night tested positive for COVID-19. I asked, "are you feeling ok?" to which he replied, "yes." "Is the person who tested positive feeling ok?" "Yes," he replied, "she only got tested because her daughter, who she recently saw, had a positive COVID-19 test." Never mind that EVERYONE involved in my short story has a nearly ZERO percent chance of being hospitalized or dying from COVID-19. All are healthy, in the 50s and 60s, no co-morbidities, no other systemic health issues. Turned out a few hours later, after the home-test originally showed a 'positive', a test administered at a health facility came back with a 'negative result'. Everyone, rest assured, is ok, minus some frayed nerves.
I'm starting to this that what is really happening here is what psychologists call a "Mass Psychogenic Illness" or "MPI" for short. Here is the definition:
"Sometimes people in a group start to think they might have been exposed to something dangerous, like a germ or a toxin (poison). They might get signs of sickness like headache, dizziness, faintness, weakness or a choking feeling. If many people in the group start to feel sick at about the same time, we might think they have mass psychogenic illness. The group might be a class in a school or workers in an office. Mass psychogenic illness is sometimes called mass hysteria or epidemic hysteria." - American Family Physician Foundation
This phenomenon has been documented for hundreds of years and even a cursory Google search provides a long list of likely instances, many of them having occurred in the last 100 years. You might say to me something like, "well, people are dying and being hospitalized!" To which I would say yes, I don't disagree, but don't underestimate the power of the mind on the body. If you think you are sick and you stress about it enough, your body is going to have something called a psychosomatic response. That is, it is going to manifest real aches, pains and otherwise.
Name another time in modern history where we have had one single illness blasted at us, from every imaginable source of news, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for almost 2 years? Maybe the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s? What does that kind of myopic focus and obtuse portrayal of real life risk do to the psyche of millions of people? Add to that the constant visual cues of masks, everywhere you go? Is it possible to delude the entire world? Would scientists and public health officials speak up if nearly everyone in power, around the Globe, is demanding a response to the COVID-19 boogeyman? Would they? Or would they play along? Would they perhaps even stoke the fear because it is bringing them the kind of attention and professional satisfaction they have always dreamed of?
COVID-19, for the vast majority of people, is a mild illness, at all ages. By 'mild', I mean, it's equivalent to a cold or mild flu. Studies have shown that in perhaps as many as 40% of the 'cases', there are no symptoms at all, the afflicted end up being fine. For children, it literally is a cold in terms of symptoms and severity. More children, in fact, have died from Influenza, during the existence of the COVID-19 pandemic, than have died from COVID-19. I believe the latest CDC statistic I saw was that 99.997% of children (under 18) survived their 'bout' with COVID-19.
The truth is that it is mostly the elderly that are dying. The elderly and the already-sick. I'm not sure if you have hung out with many elderly people lately - I can't claim to know tons of them, but I do have several that I talk with regularly - they are a somewhat health-hyper bunch. Not as a rule, of course, some of them, like my wife's grandmother say things like "well, if COVID gets me it gets me, but I'm not going to stop living life!" Most of them, however, are somewhat fearful of it. Now, my question is, what is the effect of non-stop coverage and fear-mongering on them? Could it cause stress levels so high that they end up dying from it? If an otherwise healthy 50-something has an anxiety attack, they will most likely be ok - but what if that happens to a more-frail 75-year old?
Lest you think I'm crazy - this whole thing is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I understand that COVID-19 is actually taking some people's lives. What I'm curious about, however, is how the hysteria of it all is affecting the situation. I don't think its an understatement to say that the hysteria itself is perpetuating the pandemic.
